Amy Gahran's news and musings on how we communicate in the online age.

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Scribd.com surprise when cleaning up Facebook privacy settings

This morning, I took a few minutes to do something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile: clean up my Facebook privacy settings. It had some unintended consequences…

I just went under account settings -> privacy and worked my way through the list. Under “apps and websites,” I saw several dozen sites and apps listed that could connect to my Facebook account. Most of them I never use or didn’t even recognize. So I went through deleting Facebook access to all but about 6 services I currently use in conjunction with Facebook.

One of these services was Scribd.com — which I sometimes use to post documents that I want to be shareable and embeddable.

I figured that these Facebook connections with sites and apps mainly enabled easy sharing from those sites to Facebook. But apparently I figured wrong.

After I finished this exercise on Facebook, I had an e-mail from Scribd.com saying that my account there had been deleted.

Huh?

Granted, they gave me an easy option to “restore” my Scribd.com account — which basically meant creating a new username and password. I did that, it seems to work.

But…

I checked, and this process broke existing embeds of my Scribd.com documents.

That’s right: I now have to go back and redo in a few different blogs all the embeds of my Scribd.com documents that I’d previously created.

And that’s just wrong.

I’m assuming that I probably made the mistake of using my Facebook login to create my Scribd.com account in the first place. Which goes to show how problematic it is to rely on Facebook to create an account, or log in to an account, anywhere else. I don’t actually recall whether I first created my Scribd.com account with my Facebook login, I’ve had my Scribd account for years. But it’s possible I did that. Lesson learned.

Scribd.com, I hope you fix this issue. I didn’t see this coming, and I’m annoyed.